Least Favourite Current Fiction Writers

‘I would dread a world where to publish I had first to be certified as a nice person,’ wrote Lionel Shriver in The Spectator (16 December, 2017), and I agree. So, in the interests of countering what I consider to be the noxious and nauseating habit of being nice all the time—how the kindergarten teachers who police our arts love to lecture us on that—I have decided to publish a list of my least favourite writers. No gushing over how wonderful these fictioneers are, or what exemplary human beings they may be. No. These are people whose writing is over-rated, in my view (‘but that’s just me,’ as the current phrase goes, as if we should apologise for having an opinion at all, which we do if we are to remain PC-approved), or whose personalities I find abhorrent, usually because they’re sanctimonious or affected or hypocritical–but I feel I’m entitled to a little prejudice. I won’t give explanations. In most cases they are both over-rated as writers and also offensive to me. But not all. What other criteria did I have?

First, they had to be alive. (I may later publish a companion piece on rotten dead writers.) Next, they shouldn’t be obvious commercial hacks, like Dan Brown, James Patterson, or the Fifty Shades of Whatever woman whose name I can’t remember. We all know they’re rubbish. No, my list of deadbeat writers is culled from so-called (usually soi-disant) literary writers. You may wonder if I made a deliberate effort to make the list ‘diverse’. No, I didn’t. Most of the writers are white and half are white males (and I think straight). That ought to please the PC police. Here they are, in no particular order:

Jonathan Franzen

Jonathan Safran-Foer

Gary Shteyngart

Paul Auster

Jhumpa Lahiri

Joyce Carol Oates

Elizabeth Gilbert

Junot Diaz

George Saunders

Miranda July

No doubt some readers will be calling me a thoroughly nasty man for this. But think about it: would you rather belong to the Vicious Circle of the Algonquin Hotel in the twenties (like Dorothy Parker, I try to sharpen my tongue every morning before breakfast) or the ‘Kindly Oval’? I had better confess: I actually belong to the latter unfortunately-named group, formed at the Algonquin Hotel two months ago (yes, the genu-whine hotel in Noo York.) I was uneasy from the first about our assumed niceness, knowing what a horrible person I am, and suspecting that most people who purport to be kind all the time are hypocrites (having worked in academia, I can tell you that the writers who tell all their students they are special are usually not merely insincere, but often particularly nasty–behind the students’ backs). And apart from anything else, if you’re a writer, shouldn’t your brief be truth rather than kindness? And sometimes, don’t you have to be a teeny bit unkind to tell the truth? Are great fiction writers nice people? Consider:

Tolstoy: big bastard

Dostoyevsky: utter bastard

Rousseau: unbelievable bastard

Evelyn Waugh: snobbish bastard

Virginia Woolf: as above

VS Naipaul: incredible bastard

Martin Amis: bit of a bastard

Salman Rushdie: ditto

I’d rather be a bastard who writes brilliantly than an awesome person who writes execrably. I’m not claiming I am a brilliant bastard of course.

And besides, be honest—Kindly Oval or Vicious Circle? Which do you want to belong to? Which sounds like more fun? Maybe there’s a reason our current fiction is mostly such shite compared to the fiction of a hundred years ago. There’s many a true word spoken in jest, as a certain wise man once said. And what is humour, really, but expressing one’s sense of superiority over dimwits, louts, the crass and vulgar? No wonder satire is dying.

Do name your own least favourite writers. I won’t comment on them, even if I disagree.

Garry Craig Powell, until 2017 professor of Creative Writing at the University of Central Arkansas, was educated at the universities of Cambridge, Durham, and Arizona. Living in the Persian Gulf and teaching on the women’s campus of the National University of the United Arab Emirates inspired him to write his collection of linked stories, Stoning the Devil(Skylight Press, 2012), which was longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. His short fiction has appeared in Best American Mystery Stories 2009, McSweeney’s, Nimrod, New Orleans Review, and other literary magazines. Powell lives in northern Portugal and writes full-time.